Apparently my playtesting schedule is on Valve Time. My last blog post said I would be ready for playtesting soon, and our more astute readers will note that it has been almost two months since then. I did note at the time that I had a vacation coming up that would probably push things back, but I did not expect the dead hard drive that I came home to after the trip.
I've got my main development system mostly put back together after plenty of time spent reinstalling and trying to recover what I could from the dead drive. Fortunately my important files are all on RAID 1 arrays so I didn't lose anything important, but there were around 230 GB of data on the dead drive that would have been time-consuming to replace. When all was said and done though, I think the only major thing I lost was my Windows game installs under Wine, which is no huge loss (especially since a number of them were in Steam, so reinstalling will be fairly simple).
On the brighter side, I've gotten some feedback on the most recent build already and have addressed some of the issues that were found. I need to verify that those changes won't break something else, and then we should be looking at some playtesting again. No promises though. ;-)